OCZ
has stated before that it delayed
its Vertex drives due to firmware upgrades. DailyTech
has now learned more details on why OCZ held back
shipments of its flagship SSD drives.

The latest firmware for OCZ's Vertex series boosts sequential
read and write performance, so much so that it can compete with Intel's
X-25E Extreme series on performance. However, the Vertex boasts a much
greater capacity and a much lower price.

The Vertex series, which
uses an Indilinx
Barefoot SSD controller, was originally specified at 200MB/s
sequential read and 160MB/s sequential write. However, OCZ's internal
tests show up to 250MB/s sequential read and 240MB/s sequential write
speeds.

These tests were conducted on an empty drive, and will not officially
be presented to consumers. However, it gives an indication of
how fast the final drives will be and allows some results to be
inferred.

While the firmware is responsible for a large part of the improved
performance over the introductory specifications, it is only because of
the hardware that it is able to work with. The 120GB and 250GB drives
have 64MB of DRAM cache and more channels to access its MLC NAND flash,
whereas the 30GB and 60GB drives only have 32MB of cache.

It should be noted that OCZ rounds down its capacities for several
reasons. Most storage vendors show capacity in decimal format, whereas
Windows show capacity in binary format. This means that the reported
capacity is lower than what is on the label.

Most SSDs also reserve
some capacity for redundancy in case of bad
sectors, and also for wear leveling. These reserved
areas may occupy up to five percent of an
SSD's storage capacity.

While sequential read/write performance is nifty, I think too many people are getting caught up into those #'s. How a controller performs overall is what matters. Random streaming of 4K blocks, for example, is much more demanding on the controller. I/O throughput + the ability for the controller to handle smaller blocks efficiently poses a much greater challenge to SSD makers.

This is where the Intel controller happens to shine. While it may not have the fastest sequential read/write performance, it is a very well-rounded controller that has best-in-class I/O performance, random block read performance, etc. Which means in real world usage, Intel still bests much of the competition, even SSD's sporting higher theoretical xfer limits.

I can't wait for a full review on the Vertex and how much additional power consumption the 32/64mb of cache will use, along with the rest of the performance aspects of this SSD. We can have a great alternative to the expensive X25-E.

So, am I missing it, or did they not disclose % of disk space utilized anywhere in that 'report'?

It's well known that entirely filling up an SSD is a very bad idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the sort of 'torture test' used in order to get the drives performing as reported in the first place. Now there's no question that ideally this wouldn't happen, it's hard to avoid all of the inherent flaws of MLC flash... By vastly increasing most all the important aspects, the Intel SSD gets itself into trouble when all of its storage capacity is used.

Anyway, it's not all that difficult to keep the drive performing like new, just leave it a decent buffer of free space and turn off the idiotic windows page file.

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